China's AI Push Sounds Alarms, Airplane Seat Debate, Chris Best Joins | Ferdinand Dabitz, Kaiwei Tang, Steven Schwartz, Katie Roof, Zavain Dar, Chad Edwards

27:46And you just threw in every possible AI-ism and got flagged 100 % by Pangram. No, I think people will enjoy this. The revealed preference is probably that people don't care if it's good and they enjoy the content. But we'll go back and forth and debate it with Chris Best today and see where all of that is going. He wrote a post against clawed fishing. He doesn't want people to be disingenuous about their process. Now, do you think that sub stack writers should admit when they hire essentially ghost writers?

28:29Probably. Because sometimes you start a brand under a name. Like not every post on Bloomberg.com is from Michael Bloomberg. In fact, none of them are they're all from other people but they disclose this is from you know some writer this is from joe wesenthal right um but some new influencer brands have grown even in the pre-ai era i had a writer on my team when i was doing youtube videos where i would write something he would do a draft we try to go back and forth i'd put him in the credits um but i wouldn't like kick it off with like hey just so you know that says book authors don't that is certainly that's 100 true uh some book authors will put like this is written by this person and this person it depends on like the aura of the ghost writer some ghost writers actually do get credits in the book but yes most book authors like tom clancy i think passed away and they're still producing books there's a number of writers where their their individual brand grew so big that they can you can have like a new business yeah they become their own brand and so yeah i I would imagine that 30 % of the books in like an airport bookstore are just 100 % ghostwritten and probably don't disclose it.

29:48I do think it should be possible to get to the truth if you hunt hard enough. But I don't necessarily need you to put it front and center. So let's say that the next Tom Clancy book, they hire someone who's effectively a prompt engineer and they're writing it using AI. I would like to be able to look in the back of the book and see a paragraph that discloses that, but it doesn't need to be on the cover. On the cover, it can just say Tom Clancy. Yeah, for a Substack author or creator, just put it somewhere that you have a team of people that help you create your work. Well, Dave Eggers took to the Financial Times saying that no one is going to read AI books.

30:38He's, of course, the author of The Circle. He's an American writer, editor, publisher. Heartbreaking work of staggering genius is his 2000 memoir, bestseller, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He says, gullible and ridiculous. No one will read AI novels. I think people are already reading AI novels, So maybe he means like no one who's cool or no one who he likes or something. Let's read through a little bit of this Financial Times article. Dave Eggers offers a hand so I can clamber aboard his 23-foot sailboat moored in the shadow of San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. It's a grand setting with few frills as we sit on the stern a meter apart, fuel cans and fishing nets at our feet.

31:23There's no one around to disturb our conversation. The nearest toilets are port-a-lose, a short bike ride away. The birthing fees are negligible, making it one of the cheapest places to live in uber-wealthy Silicon Valley. I hadn't thought of that. Sailboat, if you're at a tech company, this has got to be the next big lock-in trend. Antonio Garcia Martinez did this. He did. He talked about it in his book, Chaos Monkeys. I won't be satisfied until I see LARPers posting images on Twitter being like, hey, I just moved to San Francisco. I'm building the next one person,$25 billion company. I'm finding a houseboat in San Rafael.

32:00Yeah? How much? For$1 ,000. It actually works out to$1 ,483 a month, apparently, if you finance it through BoatTrader. Goodbye, Tyler. It's only about$200 ,000 to live in a 2022 houseboat. 2022? That's a brand new houseboat. Yes, you have to think about the slip fees. but you could easily come in, have your own house on the water for a few grand a month. The average one-bedroom rent in San Francisco is like two grand, three grand right now. Yeah, you can have a whole house and a boat. And a boat. It's amazing. This is the hack. If you get a job in tech and you're printing, making six figures, move into a houseboat.

32:40Let's pull this up. Is this an option in LA? Should members of the team be doing this? Should we recommend this to guys? Look at this, almost brand new. You have a 2024 La Mer Modern 11. It's a 36-foot houseboat. We have a video here. Well, Dave Egger says they call it a$10 dock with a million-dollar view. Look at this, John. This? Yeah. A couple thousand bucks a month. This is where the next great startup will be born. Yeah. For sure. Garages are out. Garages are going to be out. And also, like, oh, take your shoes off. It's natural to take your shoes off when you're on a boat. You know? Right?

33:17Unless you've got boat shoes. Wear boat shoes. The La Mer Modern 11 offers reliable performance and strong power with two Yamaha 25 high thrust engines providing a total of 50 horsepower. Its two cabins and one head ensure overnight comfort for extended stays. How about year-long stays? How about a decade-long stay? The boat's design includes an upper deck terrace with flexi teak flooring, enhancing its appeal for relaxation and entertainment. And might I say locking in standard features such as air conditioning. We have air conditioning on our houseboats with reverse cycle heat, heated floors, LED lighting.

33:55Heated floors. LED lighting. Yeah. The inclusion of foam-filled composite floats and galvanized steel subframe ensures durability and stability. Did we just solve the housing crisis? Send this to Sager and Jetty immediately. This is seasteading. This is the teal thesis. Everyone living in houseboats, just more to each other. BoatTrader.com is saying that this modern houseboat would come out to just$2 ,259 with only$52 ,000 down. I promise that we have no financial relationship with BoatTrader.com. Yeah. Even though I'm making a pretty strong pitch here. Yeah. I love it. I'm tempted. Maybe we should.

34:38I mean, you can. I'm finding another at 2021. Okay. For only$99 ,000. now. Only, yeah, only$100 ,000. This comes out to$738 a month. That is cheap. That is cheaper. They're giving houseboats away, John. When I moved to San Francisco, we live in the Tenderloin, three people, and it was$1 ,500 a month. How many people do you think you could sleep in there, given that one of us slept in a closet and the other one slept in the living room? So there was only, it was a one-bedroom, technically. We had three dudes in a one-bedroom, $1 ,500 a month. Only three? Equivalent to$500 a month. Do you think you could fit two people in there in a$700 a month houseboat?

35:17Oh, for sure. Yeah, so we're finding slip. The team is finding slip fees around L.A. for$700 a month. You get a... Everyone's got to be houseboat maxing. Imagine just bombing with your whole crew. You can get this houseboat for only$600 a month. This is elite. This is the future. We must return to the ocean, return to the sea. anyway Dave Eggers thinks no one's going to read AI books we can move on TLDR we got distracted sorry but congratulations on the sick houseboat it sounds amazing the article is actually funny it goes into the whole thing how he was like chirping with Sam Altman goes to open AI headquarters welcome to the houseboat the business of buoyancy the president of propellers I love it the presidency of propellers should you recline your airplane seat what do you think people are going back and forth on this Brandon Duck says I don't remember subscribing to this channel but I've been listening for 10 minutes I'm having a good time welcome last name Ducks comes on just for the half make it make sense make it make sense I just happen to be here for the duck section of the show Andrew says I'm going to need a double wide houseboat lol bootlegging distilled anthropic models on the houseboat there we go Living the dream.

36:39Okay, so should you recline your airplane seat? There's a central, investigating the central dilemma of our time. Joshua Rothman in The New Yorker wrote a piece. Imagine this scenario. After a long drive to the airport, you've just taken off for a 15-hour flight. Where are you going? 15 hours is so long. How long was the flight to Austria from L.A.? I think it's like 12 hours. I think you're going to the Middle East. You're going to the Middle East, maybe. Okay. You're in coach, and a family of three is sitting behind you, a man, a woman, and a toddler. They seem nice, but as the flight continues, the kiddo grows restless.

37:13He kicks your seat and pokes her toys into your shoulder. Stop that, you hear the father say. The toddler incredibly quiets down. The cabin lights dim. It's time to sleep. Yet, just as rest closes in, you sense motion. The seat in front of you is reclining. You watch as it comes all the way back. Now you feel cramped with someone else's seat in your face. You also notice some stiffness in your shoulders. Your fingers caress your own recline button. Surely the reclined upon are entitled to recline. Just as you start to lean back, you hear a clearing throat. You turn around to see the dad who fixes you with his gaze.

37:47Excuse me, he says. Would you mind keeping your seat up? I think it's game on. They put the button there. They would just take it away. Yeah, I think I've always expected everyone to just recline. Everyone reclines. Everyone has the same amount of space. It's the conservation of space. It's really hard to make the argument that the vertical seat is more comfortable than the recline seat. Exactly. So I think everyone commit to comfort. Everyone commits to comfort. And then the chat is sharing the real alpha. Stand up immediately when the flight lands. Have you seen those Meta Ray-Ban videos where people sprint to the front?

38:20It's so rude. The guy is like, as soon as he goes beep, he just bolts and passes everybody and gets to the front. Very rude. I don't think you should do that. This is anti-social behavior. I don't think you should recline your seat. How is it antisocial? Because you're infringing on someone. Just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. But they put the button there. Horrible take. Horrible take. That's like, don't use the bathroom on the plane. They put the bathroom there. My entire life, even as a child, I was looking up, waiting for the seatbelt sign to be up in the air. The seatbelt sign's off.

38:56You recline your seat. Everyone reclines your seat. All good. Yeah. What about ordering a Diet Coke on a plane? If I'm sitting next to you, will you order a Diet Coke or is that antisocial behavior? Because there's a percentage chance that you will spill that Diet Coke on me, thereby inconveniencing me. The most pro-so, if you really care about me, you should not order anything. You shouldn't eat anything. You shouldn't drink anything. You should sit there in your unreclined seat, perfectly upright, silent, don't make a peep. That's completely different. Okay. What's your stance on JBL in the airplane?

39:31A little petty walk. Pro JBL. I do think that could be the next trend. The big question is, are you bringing on your smart, portable speaker, maybe from an open AI, are you bringing that on the plane and talking to it the whole time? Is that offensive? I think that's deeply offensive. Have you seen when a band is traveling and they start playing on the plane? Have you seen these videos? No. I haven't. That sounds cool, though. I'll send you one. That would make me jump. So this all started because in 2014, 538 asked around 1 ,000 flyers what they thought about reclining their seats. 41 % of them said that reclining was rude.

40:19So they lost. It's not rude. It's over. 59 % said it's fine, I guess, if it was just binary. That number seems to have risen, though. In 2020, Eric Jones, a math professor who writes about travel statistics on the website The Vacationer, conducted a similar survey and found that 77 % of respondents objected to reclining. Wow. Sheep. Sheeple over here. We got sheeple in the building. Okay, how about this? I think you should be able to recline if you're, like, dressed nicely. If you're wearing sweatpants, then you don't get to recline. You don't get to recline. Sort of a conditional recline. Should kids be able to kick the seat in front of them as much as they want?

40:55See, that's something I will totally put up with. I'm totally fine getting kicked in the back by a kid. Because it's so brutal as a parent, as a kid, to be on a plane. They're locked up in the plane. That's miserable. And just tough it up. You're reclined. You have multiple inches of padding. Unless you got Ronaldo back there, you're going to be fine. Order that hot pizza pocket. Live life in the permanent underclass. Live a little, for God's sake. Yeah. Let's pull up this video.

41:29Oh, this is so good. I love this. Like, this is so antisocial behavior. This is so breaking the social contract. But it's also just such an elite performance that you got to respect it a little bit. This is a crazy, getting around that woman is crazy, crazy, crazy work. I can't believe this. I might, if I'm really in a hurry, I might go one seat forward. Like, if I'm on the aisle, I might sort of, like, make sure I get the first position, pole position. I think that's there. Chat wants to know, if the plane is in free fall, would you recline a little on the way down? Engine failure. I think, yeah, that's fine.

42:16I think that's fine. Okay. Okay, so you would be rude to your neighbors in this sort of stressful, potentially terrible, life-threatening moment. You wouldn't mind being rude to your neighbors? In my final moments, that's when you would choose to disrespect me, Tyler? Not when I'm living life, having a Diet Coke, enjoying myself. You're fine then. But when I'm in my last breath, that's when you decide to add insult to future injury. Yeah. Weird. Wow. I don't get it. Make it make sense. Wow. Make it make sense. Coca-Cola rebrand. We got to talk about the Coca-Cola rebrand. There's a bunch of things.

42:54There's so much good news today. Coca-Cola rebranded. And there's a video of this. And people are saying it looks like a tobacco brand. I want your brand review. Coca-Cola unveiled a new global brand identity. It's not technically the Marlboro font. Flights crashing in five minutes. Can you recline your seat? back, please.

43:21Ridiculous. Pull up the video of the Coca-Cola rebrand. I want Jordy's brand review. There we go. The most recognized brand. This is huge for me.

43:46Wow, they did it. They did it. They finally did it. Serif's border radius zero. Sharp edges, full bleed. It's right to the edges. And people were expecting it to look extremely boring. Sans Serif, sort of an Apple ripoff. We can pull up this post from Fabrizio Rinaldi about what he was expecting to show sort of where things have been going in rebrand. high fashion. Let's pull up Fabrizio's rendition of the Coca-Cola rebrand. Wasn't this something that you would expect, but instead we got something much more convenient? Minimalism is out. It's been out for a while. Maximalism started ripping early last year off a small base, but it's coming back.

44:35It does sort of look like Marlboro. People say it's not technically the Marlboro font. It's not the Marlboro font. It looks a little bit different, but it's pretty close. But also, I mean, incredible alpha in the fact that Marlboro effectively hasn't been able to advertise in 30 years. Like it's a storied brand. They clearly put an incredible amount of effort into developing the brand. But it's vague enough that even a big brand like Coca-Cola can sort of rip it off and be in the clear. Like besides a few – yeah, the fridge cigs thing. Tyler says fridge cigs for the win. They're leaning into the fridge cigarette.

45:09Yeah, saying they're leaning into the fridge cigarette concept. Yes. Very smart. Okay, other movie news. Point Break. Have you seen it? No. But you will be able to see it because it's being restored in 4K and it's being re-released in theaters this summer for its 35th anniversary. Highly recommend it. Keanu Reeves. Fantastic movie. Patrick Swayze. It's such a good movie about a bunch of bank robbers who are also extreme athletes. It's super sick. You'd love it. Maybe that's the next movie you see. Maybe we can make it happen even this year. There's another story about Restomods from the factory.

45:46Companies are going back and offering the actual manufacturer. Do you want to just describe for everyone what is a Restomod and then what are the critiques of it? Take me through the TJ Parker critique of the Restomod. We've talked to him about it. When someone says Restomod, what are we talking about here? Okay. So Restomods can look like a lot of things. There's like a range. But at the most basic level, you're taking a classic car and you're trying to not necessarily make it feel like it is a product that was made in the year 2026. But you're trying to make it at least feel – sometimes they do that, but you're trying to make it at least feel like it's fresh off of the dealer lot.

46:33So I'm restoring it, but I'm also modifying it a little bit. Yeah. Rest of the body. Well, there's a range. So there's some Restomods that are just – they're restoring it to a new condition even though it's an older vehicle. And when you say you are restoring it, typically this is individuals who want this car. They go to another company that is not the maker of that car. And then they say, I would like to purchase a Porsche 911 Restomod. And it's from 2003, but it drives – everything has been restored. There's been some modifications. Maybe it has car play, heated seats. Maybe they've updated little things here and there, tweaked the exhaust.

47:15So it's not original. It's not fully just purely restored. But what's happening now? Because that's been an independent business, sort of unauthorized. What's happening now? Yeah, there's a huge spectrum to it. So some might just be making the interior a lot nicer, basically restoring the engine, updating the transmission, things like that, all the way through like adding features and functionality like car play all the way through sometimes like redesigning the entire interior to make it almost a new car so there's some resto mod companies that will just partner with the best automotive designers in the world to just almost fully redesign the car and they're basically just keeping like they're keeping keeping everything is being turned over to some degree except the fact that from a regulatory standpoint, it's still the original car, right?

48:08And so that helps you, that helps to make it easier for Restomod company to like make a new car because they're, they don't have to go through all the - That's what Tyler has. He has a 2014 Jeep Grand Cherokee Restomod. It is beautiful. It's amazing. Everything about that car is fantastic. That's why it's so popular. It's taste. It's Aura. So Singer is, you know, one of the most prominent companies in this category, but they become so popular that manufacturers are saying, hey, we want in on the action. Who wants in on the action? And so the newest player, Range Rover. Range Rover. Let's pull up this video if we can.

48:48And classic Range Rovers are having a huge moment. There's a piece in the journal about it. Look at this. And people have been clamoring for the analog feel. People have gotten sick of the endless buttons. And this is a way to go back to a 1993 Range Rover classic, but have it drive as reliably as a brand new car. I'm super excited about this. My number one pet peeve with Restomods historically is they take this beautiful classic car and then they fix it up and then they put their logo on it. Oh, yeah. And I saw a vintage Bronco that just, like, somebody applied this sort of logo to it in the end that just said vintage.

49:41It's like, I don't need you to tell me that this vintage car is vintage, right? You could just make it look like the original version of it. So, anyways, I'm super excited for more manufacturers to get into this space. Yeah. The category is growing quickly, so I think even many of the Restomod players will still do quite well. And this seems super bullish for Range Rover as a company. They say check with your local retailer or Land Rover Classic. You imagine that a lot of people will be drawn into showrooms for this. Will they leave with a 1993 Range Rover Classic that's been restored from the factory?

50:20Or will they buy something new? because they're like, yeah, maybe I want that, but that'll be my weekender, and I just need something for the family, so I'll just buy something more modern or new. It's just another – it's almost like a halo car for just to bring people in. Don't you think? If you're driving by an Audi dealership and you saw the R8, you'd go in. Maybe you wind up with an A4, but it drew people in. It brought aura to the brand. This does the same thing. Just seeing more 1993 Range Rover classics in perfect condition on the road will make a 2026 autobiography look cooler and feel cooler.

50:57And so that's beneficial to the whole company. Yeah, and it'll be very interesting to see the way in which manufacturers approach this category. The criticism of a lot of Restomod companies is they'll basically take a$20 ,000 car, do a little bit of work to it, and mark it up like$200 ,000. and that doesn't feel great. You know what feels great? Running a business on Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business and lets you sell in seconds, online, in-store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. And we have our first guest of the show, Ferdinand Dabitz from Augustus.

51:43Let's warm up the show. He's back. We got some big news. You raised some money. Welcome back to the show. You absolute dog. You absolute dog. How are you doing? Give us the update. What's going on with the business? What's the news? No, yeah, I'm feeling good. I like this car stuff. By the way, I have a 2009 Land Rover. There we go. Cool. Myself. That's a great car. So that's good. No, Long Live Augustus. Yeah, we raised some money. I think one thing we always liked about the bank thing is that it felt so hard, right? And was this like... And now you're making it look easy. Yeah, you are making it look easy.

52:26I wanted something that felt hard so I could make it look easy. To make it look effortless, right? You are making it look effortless. I remember when we hung out, I think it was at the end of last year during the holiday season. You were like, yeah, I'm working on this thing. and here you are less than a year later. $180 million Series B,$1 billion valuation, Tiger Global's in, you got a bunch of other folks in. What actually did unlock the new round? Like what's the progress of the core business? I think it's a great question, right? I think there are these, probably there are these three things that were and are still exciting about the business, right?

53:07I think that the first thing is just this big idea around dollarization, right? And Augustus is built to dollarize the world. And I think people have really started to understand that that's a super important thing. And I think over the last 20 years, we've seen a trend towards de-dollarization effectively. If you look at the distribution of the dollar globally, kind of like traditionally distributed through these clearing banks, these correspondent banks, that chart goes down into the right. The number of clearing banks has just fallen off year over year. And people were kind of like excited about it, right?

53:43Because post 9-11, people said, okay, it's like kind of risky to like distribute the dollar and be a bank in Latin America, be a bank in Middle East, be a bank in Africa. Like you probably don't want to do that. And so it should be super expensive and so on and so forth. And people like from a macro point of view start to regret that. And I feel like, okay, actually, it's kind of great if people use the dollar all around the world, right? I think it's, it's, it's, it's increases dollar demand, right? It's anti-inflationary. And it's also this incredible instrument of soft power, right? The first thing we do when Russia goes to Ukraine is we take them off SWIFT and we shut off their dollar clearing.

54:15And this is an amazing thing where we don't have to send the tanks and the boys. We can influence what's going on. And so there was this idea like, hey, should we maybe revert that trend and build a modern correspondent bank, a modern dollar clearer that can dollarize the world and provide high quality dollar access to places outside of the United States? I think that was the first big idea that really made a lot of sense from a policy point of view, right? I think it enabled us to charter this bank, but I think also private counter markets were able to buy into it. So I think that was the number one thing.

54:51I think then the second macro thing was this idea, AI bank, right? If you now build a modern correspondent bank, what does that mean?

55:03I think so, right? I like the sound of it. I like the sound of it. I think it kind of like, it makes sense, right? I think the global economy is on this like consistent investment thesis to that every major industry is going to be transformed by AI. And I think Augustus is genuinely one of the few assets companies that has exposure to doing that for banking, right? Because Augustus is a bank itself, not yet, conditionally approved, as you guys know. And is also kind of young enough and cool enough to be a legitimate technology company. Right. And so we felt like they felt this like legitimate opportunity to take this very operation intensive business, dollar clearing, correspondent banking, where Citibank has tens of thousands of analysts in the wire room that go for the payment file and do the reconciliation and payment office and take it and just automate a bunch of it and turn it into a better business for customers with better economics.

55:55Right. And so that felt, I think, pretty good. And then I think the third thing was just the progress that the team has made over the last year or so, right? We got the U.S. National Bank conditionally approved. I think we're the eighth company in the history, not in the history of the United States, eighth company since 2010, a younger history to kind of get the condition approval. That was a big one. And then we're already kind of big on euro clearing, right? We scaled a couple of billions of euros for some of the largest fintechs and FIs in the world. And that business was also growing very fast.

56:23And so I think these things coming together felt like a good moment and kind of resulted in that round, I'd say, is my little play-by-play. Awesome. Do you have something? No, go for it. I mean, you mentioned that we are on an upswing of dollarization right now. And that feels like a narrative violation because over the past two years, we've been in this period of deglobalization, tariffs. There's international conflicts. I don't love it, but I could totally imagine a lot of international countries saying, well, we're going to pull back from our relationship with the United States because they're levying tariffs all over the place and seem to be adopting an America first strategy.

57:10What am I misreading about the international climate that's actually driving increased dollarization in 2026? Yeah, I think it's less empirical as in this is actually happening. It's more normative. Do we want this to happen? And what kind of world do we want to live in? And I think people are starting to come around to this idea that we want to live in a dollarized world. And that wasn't always a given. And I think it wasn't even a given for the last 20 years. As I said, since 9-11, I think correspondent banking has been an increasingly unattractive business. And people say, stay away from banking non-US financial institutions.

57:46Don't do it. And I think that the wind is changing on that a bit. And then I do think that the administration is actually much keener on dollarization than people give them credit for, right? I think all the work that the Trump admin is doing on stable coins, for example, is largely driven by a dollarization thesis, right? This idea that if we can more effectively distribute the dollar abroad, it's good for the United States, right? Because it's an instrument of soft power and increases dollar demand and it's anti-inflationary, right? And I think that there's a real school of thought in that, and that's big on this.

58:17And I think this is, in a way, a policy and a byproduct of that as the public-private partnership that is a national bank. It's not just a normal company. It has to live in these regulatory moments. Amazing. Well, congratulations. Keep up the great work. Incredible update. Hearing from you in just a couple months at this pace. You're making it look easy. I'm ready to say this. Making it look easy. We'll talk to you soon. Great that you did. Have a good one. Let me tell you about MongoDB. What's the only thing faster than the AI market? Your business on MongoDB. Don't just build AI. Own the data platform that powers it.

58:52Our next guest is Kawe Tang from Light Phone, co-founder and CEO. How are you doing? Hey, all right. Thanks for having me. Welcome to the show. Great to have you. We were debating this earlier. So first, let's start with an introduction, and then I have a bunch of questions about the correct terminology for this category. A lot of people call it dumb phone, but I call it simple phone. Okay, so you don't like the term dumb phone. Yeah, I mean, you know, your phone gets smarter, you actually get dumper. So we, you know, the phone needs to do what the tool does for us, like hammer a screwdriver, right?

59:32It does that for you and you put it back. You don't swipe your hammer for five hours so the hammer company can make money. So that's exactly how we design Light Phone and all the tools inside the Light Phone. Okay, so a minimalist flip phone is the newest product. Talk us through the evolution. How do you measure demand? Why flip phone? It's very nostalgic. I love the idea, but what was the broader thesis? Yeah, I mean, we've been doing this for 10 years. I think back in 2015, we were in the incubators at Google Creative for designers. And through talking to a lot of VCs and successful entrepreneurs, especially app entrepreneurs, we realized that everyone's racking about how much time, attention they get from their users.

1:00:19That's why they're successful. They could categorize, analyze the data and sell the data to the highest bidder. That's the whole attention civilian economy. And I just don't like that. I don't want to see advertisement. I don't want people to know where I am 24-7. But I love technology. I want modern technology without the civilian attention economy built in. So what we're trying to do is offering a device that has all the modern utility tools. But without a business model built in to maximize your attention. So you could call somebody, text somebody, get a direction home, listen to music, picking notes, you know, QR code reader.

1:01:00But no one's trying to maximize your attention so they can make money. Same idea, like we're not trying to ask people to give up technology. We're trying to say, hey, we all have different shoes, different car, different jacket, right? You can use different tool at a different scenario, right tool for the time. And that's the essential idea of life. Be intentional about your time. Don't waste it on social media. When was the last time you or anyone else spent three hours swiping the TikTok and you snap out of it? I feel so good about myself. Every day, baby. I'm on the internet three hours every day.

1:01:38But yes, I am the exception to the rule. I am the screen time.

1:01:44So assume people listening are with Verizon or an AT &T or maybe another carrier. For the light phone, do you have to get basically an entirely separate number? Is there a way to use the same number of possible devices? I think it's maybe Chris Williamson talks about this, like the cocaine phone and the vegetable phone or something like that. Like they will have one phone with all of the crazy apps on them and then one that's like essentially a work phone. And when they carry that phone, it's like brick. There's a whole bunch of different trends. But can you actually run like a single number with two phones?

1:02:23Yeah, I mean, that's healthy, right? We always need a balance. There's a different way to do that. You could turn on call forwarding. You could physically remove your SIM card on your smartphone and put it into your light phone. You can also utilize servers like T-Mobile digits that give you two SIM cards tied to one number. It's a different way to utilize Light Phone as a secondary phone or primary device. But we actually see more of our customers using Light Phone as their primary device now, especially younger generations. Yeah, they go all the way. Yeah, I was in an event in New York. A group of young people promoting real-life experience.

1:03:07And there's a performance in front, in the stage. And there was a woman in the crowd, like, took out her smartphone and tried to record the performance. And everyone's booing her. You know, I think this is no longer short-term, not a retro feeling. Oh, just temporary feeling good about retro technology. I think this movement started by the young people, the Gen Z or younger, is here to stay. Us, the AI, us, the 5G, iPhone 45, keep getting bigger and bigger. I think the other side of the movement is going to get bigger and bigger too. And we're trying to give people the options that I can opt out.

1:03:45What would it take to add Instagram Reel? Or maybe even like prediction markets. maybe you can make it discounted if people commit to doing prediction markets enough yeah you preload 10k yeah the phone is free as long as you're trading sort of a gambling phone that's five thousand dollars a month no no but i'm more more seriously um how are you uh how are you thinking about AI features? Because I imagine there's this tension between AI does give you the potential to interact with your devices in new ways, right? It's cool to be able to dictate to your devices. That's gaining a lot of popularity right now, maybe later than a lot of people would have expected.

1:04:37But then on the other side, I can imagine that a lot of your core users to date like hate ai and they're trying to get away from it yeah so how do you how do you kind of thread the needle there yeah i mean i i always said that you know ai is a tool it's a software program that's very helpful and we should treat it as such meaning that we when we start a life phone it's not because there's a new technology being invented so we design product for that right we design product because we've seen people frustrated anxious stressed out not happy with the smartphone social media but there's no way out i think the same logic applied to ai or this program this tools it can be really useful it can be helpful as long as it saved my time so i you're free on my time to do things important to me and make me happy i think that's a good outcome however you You guys probably know, like with AI tool, more people work more hours.

1:05:38You've been notified all the time with the things that are happening. So I think treating this particular technology as one of your tools and design and use it accordingly is the way to go. And we're not anti-AI per se, but we do see the sentiments among young people towards, you know, everything AI, the big tech push on AI. The discrepancy, the gap is getting bigger every day. as I witnessed it. You know, going to tech conference, the potential of AI is being praised. You go into this, you know, this real-life experience that young people started, Lattie Club. They don't care about AI. We've been interviewing flip phone users in a new product we created called LifeFlip, the flip phone that we just announced today.

1:06:24We've been interviewing different flip phone users for the last six months. The one thing they never bring up is AI feature. No one wants an AI button on their phone. I mean, I have no doubt it's very helpful. I have no question that it can be the future technology that saves our time to do things for us and we can move on quickly. But I just don't think it's being designed as such at the moment. Take us through the business side, the business model, the customer acquisition funnel. This is a product that I feel like it naturally generates a lot of organic earned media. It's fun talking to you about this and all the knock-on effects of phone use.

1:07:09I imagine every product reviewer reviews it. There's probably a decent amount of attention that effectively comes for free in this category. But what does the actual scaling of the business look like? Like, are you doing, like, direct response ads on Instagram Reels to get people to uninstall? Are you Adam Aseri's worst nightmare? No. So as a matter of fact, we don't utilize advertisement. We don't pay social media to promote Light Phone. So the last 10 years, all our growth are organic. From word of mouth, from press, from celebrities that are using Light Phone, including Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad, Pete Davidson, Ed Sharon from UK.

1:07:52We have a lot of people that are resonating with what we're trying to do and support it and spread the word of our life. So the last 10 years we grow, you know, every year 20 % to 50 % without any advice. I think it's only human that this resonates with a lot of people. Yeah. Talk about the decision to include podcasts. I know some people that are addicted to both making and consuming podcasts. That's a tough one. I think every tool that we designed follow the same principle. I can summarize into three principles. Number one, no advertisement. Number two, every action no user takes as a clear ending.

1:08:41What about ads in podcasts? Yeah, we snuck out some of the lights on. That's how you get in front of the light phone users is you got to just advertise on podcast. Here we go. Well, so similar to how we design music tool, right? It's not a Spotify. We design it as an MP3 player that you intentionally create a playlist for you to calm down, for you to be creative, for you to get into a certain mood using that tool as the tool. Spotify podcast, I'm sorry, podcast the same way. We sing as an educational tool, but I get it. Like loophole might be advertisement in the podcast, which we cannot control.

1:09:20But I like the idea of an old school MP3 player. There's something very satisfying about actually curating an intentional playlist, loading it up for a different moment. Like it is, yeah, it's a special, special moment. Well, everything intentional makes things special. Everything that you're intentional doing makes that experience special. The object designed for one purpose makes it special too. How do you think about what does success look like for Light Phone? Is a million people globally that use and love their Light Phone and get a new one every year when you make it newer, faster, lighter, longer battery life?

1:10:01No, playing obsolete is not something that we're interested in. The last 11 years, we introduced three phones. In Light Phone 2, we still have users using them. We're still selling them. It's been six years. We stand behind our product. We upgrade the software. We upgrade, I'm sorry, we repair Light Phone locally here in Brooklyn. And that's what we're going to do. We're not asking people to buy a new phone every year. There's no need, there's no reason to buy a new phone every year. When's the last time you upgrade your hammer? Camera? Hammer. Oh, hammer. Hammer. Well, we have to update. We actually have a gong mallet that we upgrade a lot.

1:10:42But yes, I take your point. It is a tool. I like that. Don't do that.

1:10:49We're pretty rough on our gongs. Yeah, so we've got to upgrade them a lot. But for the average person, one hammer is a lifetime supply. No, it's a great point. Well, congratulations on the watch. And yeah, I was just asking that because I feel like phones are somewhat like cigarettes in that people know that they're bad, but they're just so good in some ways for some people at some times. But I was going to say, even if you have a million people that are just like, you know, like true, true believers that are willing to make certain sacrifices in terms of like some features and things like that, you could still have a really thriving business.

1:11:36And it feels like, you know, it's not a billion users or bust here. Yeah. Oh, 28 % of Gen Z are strongly interested in acquiring a non-smartphone. 26 % of millennials interested in getting a non-smartphone. 12 % of Gen X interested in getting a non-smartphone. Whoa, the Gen X values really don't care. I think this trend is not going to stop. Yeah. Yeah, this trend is going to get bigger and bigger. Very cool. Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congratulations. Very cool. Launch thelightphone.com. You can go and pre-order one. It's available for pre-order. And the light flip is shipping April, 2027.

1:12:18Thank you for coming on the show. Great to meet you. Talk to you soon. Have a good day. Cheers. Goodbye. Let me tell you about CrowdStrike. Your business is AI. Their business is securing it. CrowdStrike secures AI and stops breaches. Our next guest is the best. We got Chris Best, the founder and CEO of Substack. Welcome to the show, Chris. How are you doing? I'm doing good, man. Thanks for having me. The great slop wars have entered a new era. It's not just nice to talk to you. It is amazing. It is the best. It is the best to talk to you. Tell us about the slop problem on Substack. What is the shape of the problem?

1:12:56What motivated this? Take us through the new product. What's the state of the union in the slop fest? The slop fest. The state of the trough. The state of the trough. I mean, the place I started with this, I've had the experience that I think a lot of us have had, not on Substack, but just on the internet in general. I'm scrolling the timeline. I'm reading stuff. And sometimes I just have this experience where I'm reading something. Sometimes it's by someone that I think I know. Sometimes it's something. And I have this kind of invasion of the body snatchers experience where you realize you're sort of reading something that was actually just pure Claude.

1:13:31Yeah. Purely generated. Yep. And it's kind of – it makes the experience reading on the internet worse because you're constantly wondering. You constantly have to wonder, is this real? Am I actually reading something this person believes in or did Brian Chesky get hacked or whatever is going on? So I've been feeling this. A lot of the people I know who spend time online have been feeling this. And then the guys at Pangram did this study because they've been running this browser extension, right, where they have their own browser extension. You can install and you can just have stuff labeled. And they studied different platforms, and they found that on some platforms, like I think LinkedIn, 40 % of the long-form text is generated by AI.

1:14:14And in my view, it's not the case that all AI is necessarily – I would have expected 90, but 40 is a lot. Well, a good point here is not all slop is AI. You know, LinkedIn, even pre-AI had a lot of stuff on there that's, you know, maybe not the best. Pretty sloppy sometimes. Depending on your perspective. I mean, some people like it. That's fine. And I think, you know, they had Substack coming in about 10%. I started looking at this. I started thinking about this. And to my mind, the problem is not people using AI. The problem is when you have kind of the deception that comes with, I'm expecting that I've got a real connection to a person.

1:14:58And I'm actually reading something that's written by no one. This photo is my experience when I realize I'm reading AI text. Yeah. Yeah, this is the moment you realize. And the moment you realize, that's when I think of this as cloud fishing. Yeah, yeah. It's about the violation of expectation. And it's the fact that you realize and then you're like, oh, this changes the experience that I think I'm having. And it's so weird. I'm not against reading AI text. Totally. I read AI text all the time. Yeah. When there were those rumors that opened AI, I was thinking about a social network, and it was still really, really early.

1:15:29I was like, I would love to be able to subscribe to a feed of Tyler Cowen's deep research reports. Because I know he's using these tools. I know he's coming up with really interesting and creative prompts, probably asking about what's the food like in this random town internationally. And I would like to learn what he's learning. but the whole premise of that would be that I'm just getting a link to chatgpt.com. And people do share these around, but we haven't really, because we're not in like the link sharing world, people haven't actually coalesced around like, yeah, I'm just going to share you a link to my deep research report.

1:16:05But sometimes that would be better than you took, you copy and paste it, and you forgot to put the, is there anything else you'd like me to help you with or whatever? Or you left it in, then you get these sales emails that leak the prompt to you. Yeah, and so I can imagine that there's probably a really banger sub stack out there where the journalist or the writer is going to say, look, I'm going to go find an interesting fact or I'm going to give you a roundup and I'm going to do the work of prompting and fact checking and making sure that this AI instantiated newsletter is high quality and high quality enough for you to read.

1:16:39Yeah, the example that I always give is like if Alex Heath was using AI. He uses AI often, all the time. Yeah, he's talked about it. But like Alex Heath using AI, I'm like, great. I'm not subscribing for the writing. I'm subscribing for information, the facts that he's finding first, plus the takes and his point of view on that. And if he just finds the facts and then does dictation and just kind of rambles for 10 minutes, turns it into something that is short. But the disclosure is important. Yeah, the way you can tell that's good is because the disclosure wouldn't ruin it for you. And we have all takes on the platform.

1:17:24We have everybody from – Sam Chris wrote a piece recently that said, if you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you. That's a death threat. Do you think I wouldn't be able to tell? I can tell. And then we have people that are doing the thing you're suggesting that are using these tools to like – Slop is not something made with AI. Slop is something that nobody believes in, that you didn't actually care about. If you just go and say, hey, write me 1 ,000 viral LinkedIn posts, make no mistakes, that's Slop. If you're doing this deep thing where you're going back and forth and you're doing it – I talked to a bunch of people who do this on the platform and they're worried about Slop too.

1:17:56Because in a world where you get a bunch of things that are like low effort or like zero authorship stuff, stuff masquerading as somebody's careful work, it drowns out the actual careful stuff. You can have a platform where like the good high effort, thoughtful things get out competed by people just like spamming the zone with stuff. Yeah. And I just think that's going to be, I think that's already a real problem on some platforms. It's not a huge problem on Substack yet, but we kind of want to make sure that we're just, you know, keeping the bar high and having, giving the people who are making stuff they believe in the chance to win.

1:18:31Have you seen any, like, generational divide between how publishing AI writing is perceived? Because there's been a number of VCs, at least over on X, that are maybe in, like, the back half of their career. Well, they'll just publish an essay that's just, like, incredibly obvious that it's just, like, you know, they maybe had, like, a couple key ideas that they gave the model, and then they just took the output and just published it. And they'll usually get kind of dunked on. But it seems as though the author was not even necessarily, or the author was not necessarily even sort of aware that there's like a negative perception or that it's maybe obvious to other people.

1:19:21Have you seen anything, like have you seen a divide at all or is it just sort of random? I think we're in a period where there's like new norms that are getting figured out. It's not clear what the rules and expectations are. And there are people that have wildly different ideas of what good is. I don't think it's purely generational. I think there's people in all camps. To me, the thing, you know, I think that anti-slop is a pro-AI stance. Yeah. Right? You don't see Sam Haltman or Dario Amadei writing, doing these like clod posting things. And it's not because they don't believe in AI. Yeah. So I don't think that it's an anti-AI thing.

1:19:55I think you can be incredibly in favor of maximally using AI to do research and be even a thought partner and edit your work and help you think of even new ideas to include. but it's about ultimately creating something that's worth people's time, right? That they couldn't have just gotten by asking the same question to the same model, at least. Right. Claude is great. But if I want to talk to Claude, I can just talk to Claude. And if I'm reading you, it's because I want – there's like something else. I mean another way to look at this, you gave the example of like what if Alex Heath were making this really thoughtful thing.

1:20:42I would love that. I think everybody has an example of something where they're definitely cool with it. Everybody's talking to AI. It's valuable. On the other end of the spectrum, do you remember the guy when sort of OpenClaw was at its fervor that was famous for having the bot text his wife? He was like answering his wife's texts. I think almost everyone can look at that and be like, okay, that's probably not legit. And then there's a whole bunch of stuff on the internet that kind of falls in the spectrum between thorough research report with AI pros all the way to not having to answer my wife's texts.

1:21:13If I'm going back and forth in the comments with you, what's the expectation? If you're writing a piece, what's the expectation? Is it different if you're writing a personal story versus a – I think these things are all like new norms that will have to get created. I don't think we at Substack have all the answers. And so this is why we're kind of leaning as a first step. We're like, hey, let's just have some transparency. Let's make it so that readers can scan this text if they want and have that information and do with that, form their own judgment. Yeah. How do you think writing is changing for writers who don't use AI?

1:21:50I've noticed personally I've been writing video essays in the pre-ChatGPT era. Then all the models were not really great for a while. Then I started doing daily essays on Substack, got accused of using AI even though I wasn't. Sometimes we would pass them through AI to just fact check and grammar correct. And then that gave it the AI flavor. And so I made the decision with the team to just not proofread them basically. And so I will often be doing research in a bunch of different AI tabs and collect information. but then I'll go and just complete stream of consciousness, nonsense, grammar, all these weird twists of phrases, like I'm just speaking out loud.

1:22:38And I think it's remained like I'm getting less and less AI accusals, I guess, even though I'm like, I just writing daily, I think you're going to get accused of using AI because it's so obvious that you would save a lot of time by not actually going and doing the work. But I'm wondering if you think that that is just a unique thing to me. Well, it's not even just a problem with writing. I've noticed on YouTube there's creators that I used to love that would make history or geopolitical content or just weird niche content, even car content. And now I have that same experience of ripping the headphones off because I realized that somebody that used to put all this energy into writing these great scripts and telling these stories, you just start hearing the clodisms in the video.

1:23:28And even though they're just making an output, making a script, and then reading it, it's still coming through, and you can still tell that they didn't put craft into it. And so I've seen on YouTube there's creators that are just in the description or even in the introduction of the video saying, and to be clear, I don't use any AI in my videos. and again like even as somebody who's very pro AI I find myself like I feel like a little bit comforted hearing that because of all the bad experiences where I've gotten three minutes into a video and realize like okay this person is just reading a script that was a one prompt.

1:24:08Yeah and we added this to the feature we launched too so if you're writing something on Stubstack you can set like a how I make this statement where if somebody's scanning your thing and it can say hey I never use it or, hey, I use it in this way, or even, you know, hey, I use it extensively, but here's the perspective I'm bringing. Here's what you can get from me. I think this is true no matter how. It gets more true as AI gets more powerful. One critique is, I don't like it because it's bad, because it's like a clodism or because it's just like detectable. But I actually think the underlying thing is like, am I getting a human perspective here?

1:24:42And the more powerful the AI becomes, the more important it is to know that. because if I'm not, it might still be great. But again, it's like if I want to talk to Claude, I can talk to Claude. The question is like what human believes in, stands behind, has the perspective that I'm spending my time and energy ingesting. Yeah, the other thing with Substack is like you're paying for a media product when you subscribe to someone, but you're also paying to, in many cases, at least personally, allow somebody to pursue a life's work. and that to me is like part of the sort of like social contract that you have when you subscribe to someone, which is like, you know, I am in a small way, I might be one of 10 ,000 people, but I'm allowing you to ditch your job and just pursue like an understanding of this industry or, you know, this market or whatever.

1:25:38And so that's also like, you know, if somebody just decides one day, okay, I'm kind of done with this whole independent writing thing. I'm just going to slop it up for as long as I can. People will churn, but that would be a violation, at least in my view. Do you think your recommender system will naturally sort audiences into what they like? So if there's someone who's subscribing to more AI-generated sub-stacks, they would get recommended into that and they would be satisfied with that. Is there going to be like a barbell effect here where you imagine there's like power law creators who use no AI, power law creators who use all AI?

1:26:21I think there will be some of that. And I think these tastes will change over time. But something I've noticed in myself and in people I talk to about this is a lot of these things are kind of an acquired distaste, right? It's something where, you know, a few years ago, maybe I wouldn't even recognize this as being different. And now I sort of have that skin crawling feeling. I think more people, not everybody has developed that already, but I think more people will develop it than have today. But then look, I think ultimately, you know, our perspective on this, we're pro freedom. We're not sitting here telling you what tools you can and can't use.

1:26:51We're not sitting here telling you what you can and can't read. As long as you're making the decision, you know, as your best self, what do I value? What do I want to spend my time and money on? We're happy with that. We want to kind of help people do that. And so if, you know, If there are places where people are paying for AI stuff and it's the stuff that they want and the person may – we think that's great as long as it's people are getting it with their eyes open. They know what they're getting. Yeah, it's funny. I would certainly pay$5 a month to just get a feed of Tyler Cowen's ChatGPT prompts because I would just be interested to sort of passively learn about it.

1:27:31I still think it's a good product. And I'm surprised no one has figured out a way to create that kind of product yet. I don't know. What do you think is like the – is there an AI writing product that is overtly AI that's actually been a massive breakout hit and that they've fully disclosed that this is AI generated but it still works? Any that you're aware of? You mean are there examples of texts? Like I mean somebody that like made a sub stack and it's like, hey, this is$5 a month and I'm just going to give you breaking news and analysis on these types of topics. And it's all AI generated and like actually have as anyone built a real business.

1:28:14The equivalent would be like Demon Flying Fox on YouTube. He's the one that did the Harry Potter Balenciaga. He is like an AI first video creator. It's very clearly disclosed. closed. There's a number of Instagram accounts where like the whole thing is like imagined AI futures and they are creators, but they openly use AI. I'm wondering if there's a version of that for text or sub stack. That definitely exists. And that's the thing that I believe in, right? The idea of like an AI, like an AI powered creator. The way I think of this is like AI gives you superpowers and it just also gives you new ways to be annoying on the internet.

1:28:49But if you're, you know, the A and AGI is not supposed to stand for annoying. Um, but the, like, okay, if you're saying like, I have this perspective and I'm using these tools, like, like I think that Harry Potter Balenciaga thing is genius. It's great. Um, it's genius. And I don't care that they used an AI tool to make, in fact, it's great. It's like, it's a new way to express the thing. Um, and we have, we actually, there is a bunch of that on Substack. There are people who are doing analysis, people who are sometimes writing things in other languages. There's people that are like writing and like English is not their first language, but they have some important analysis or they're like, you know, they're doing some deep research or they have some perspective and, you know, the final prose is generated, but they're transparent about that.

1:29:29I think that is great. The question, the deeper question to me is like, do you actually have to have a human artist behind the thing? Like if instead of that, if instead of I've used AI tools, if you're kind of doing the thing of like, Hey, you know, generate 1000 viral posts, make no mistakes or generate 1000 viral bots that each do 1000 viral posts make no mistakes and my view is like that may be compelling but that's not going to be valuable over time because it's going to be there's going to be no differentiation it's the thing of like yeah talking to claude is great but i can talk to claude if i want to talk to claude that makes sense do you know of any historical uh comps to this conundrum that we're in uh as citizens of the internet?

1:30:11Like, was there a period where, where authors weren't real authors, if they used a typewriter, you know, you had to, you had to write it with a, with a pen or, or, or it was frowned upon, or is this just like a, a, a novel experience? I found when I was looking for the art for the announcement post I did, I found a reverse example from history, reverse clawed fishing, which was the mechanical Turk. Do you guys know the story? It was, it was supposed to be a robot that plays chess. And so it was supposed to be like a magic strong chess playing AI. But the trick was there was actually like a chess master kind of like hiding in the bottom.

1:30:49It's the reverse of having that realization of you're absolutely right while you're reading something. Yeah, that's great. Well, congratulations on the launch. It seems like it's going really well. And we're huge fans of Pangram and the team over there. Those guys are great. They're the best detector. We're proud to partner with that. Yeah, yeah. In two more minutes before you leave, what can people expect out of Substack for the rest of the year? Like, are you – Yeah, how is the business doing in the age of AI broadly? Like, there's a narrative where it's like, oh, people would just talk to the AIs to get information.

1:31:24They're going to spend no time on Substack. And then there's another one which is like, you'll be 10 times more efficient because all your software engineering can be automated. Like, how is the business actually changing? Business is doing well. We're growing. You know, the way I think about this is I think as you get sort of plentiful, you can get anything from the AI, you can get any content, the value, you have infinite kind of like things that you can spend your time on. The value of the trusted human connection and perspective goes up. and as long as we can have the platform reward that as long as you feel like hey you know like even if you're reading tyler cowen's prompts the fact that you know have some idea of tyler cowen as a person and have invest some faith and trust in him yeah is a fundamentally valuable piece in this new world and we actually think this is again it's like if you take sort of a pro ai stance you can also have like a pro human culture stance that thinks that we're going to be able to make that even more valuable.

1:32:26Yeah. That's very cool. Well, congratulations. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Great to see you. Always fun. We'll see you soon. Cheers. Let me tell you about console. Console builds AI agents that automate 70 % of ITHR and finance support, giving employees instant resolution for access requests and password resets. Our next guest is here with us in the TVP and Ultradome live. How are you doing, Stephen? Welcome to the show. Stephen is co-founder and CEO of WAP. How are things going with WAP? You guys are going great with Bob. Thank you guys for having me here. It's super cool. Yeah, welcome.

1:32:58Yeah, it's a crazy time for the whole world right now. Okay. And I think a lot of the work we've been doing over the last several years is now coming to light in a way where there's a bunch of themes converging. And in conjunction with AI, you have a lot of people trying to figure out what they're going to do for work, what they're going to do with their jobs. You have an existential question of how to get value accrual by spending money on tokens. And I think a lot of the infrastructure we've built is trying to answer a lot of that. So things are going well and just exciting times. At its best, you're bringing small-scale entrepreneurial opportunities to people at a very, very broad basis.

1:33:40I think that's one way to look at it. We grew up, my co-founders and I, building businesses on the internet, piecing together a ton of different platforms. and at times we'd have like three or four businesses running at once and we were always the weird ones. No one else was doing that. And now it's pretty normal. And I think we are trying to build a platform that if we could go back in time, we would be addicted to as a 15-year-old. And I think that technology is there now where there is virtually no excuse to not have a really awesome income stream, especially from starting a business. And yeah, so I would say it's pretty cool.

1:34:20I want your reaction to this take from Aporia about Gen Z entrepreneurship. As they say, Gen Z entrepreneurship increasingly looks like running a portfolio of asymmetric coups rather than betting on one serious long-term project. They go on to explain that half the people I meet at beach clubs in Saint-Tropez and Marbella are doing exactly this. One year it's crypto, then an Amazon brand, then an AI lead gen agency, then solar panels or some subsidized renovation. And this was the interesting line. I used to think this was unserious entrepreneurship, but some of them have become genuinely good at it.

1:34:59Their real business isn't crypto, AI or solar panels. It's being early. That's one of my favorite takes I've heard in a long time. And I think that the reality is the businesses are getting so ephemeral that one week it's a jewelry store. The next week it's an education program teaching people how to use a new AI tool. The next week it's a UGC marketplace. And then the next week it's an agency that's selling data to labs. So the amount of trends that people are tapping into to start businesses is through the roof. And when that happens, you do get what resembles a portfolio, almost imagine like a crypto portfolio.

1:35:36And if you look at our new homepage, it actually looks like a crypto portfolio. But it's not tokens, they're businesses. And it's completely up to you to drive the business income up. And we try to figure out ways to tell you exactly what to do next in order to do that. So I think that's a fantastic exchange. exchange. And yeah. If you, if, if, uh, if you were able to talk to the, to the, you know, take you today and you have the younger version of yourself, what, what advice would you be giving on like where to start trying to make money on the internet? I would simply look at what is working on the internet today and copy it.

1:36:16And I think so. So when you were getting your start, it was trading sneakers and maybe having some bot tracking Supreme drops? Like what was it then and what is actually happening now? Well, I think that your question is interesting because you said if they want to make money, that's one thing. And I think when we were building businesses, it was never really for the money. I mean, my co-founder Cameron dropped out of high school at 15 years old and had virtually unlimited money for a 15-, 16-year-old. I think the only thing he bought was a Tesla. And other than that, he would be wearing flip-flops and T-shirt and be working all day.

1:36:56And it was never really about the money. Exactly. It was always about, I mean, we have a hoodie. It's just building cool shit with your friends. And I think that is much more the spirit that we get excited about. And in many ways, we want to make it actually not about the money and take out money from the equation so people don't have to worry about money. But there's like the advice I'd give to a young person. Yeah, that's sort of the unique luxury of being a teenager where it's like if you hit it out of the park and make$5 ,000, you feel like the king of the castle. Yeah, totally. It goes a long way and you have a lot of time and you just have nothing else to do other than to experiment with different businesses.

1:37:31And it's after roadblocks, what are all the kids supposed to do? And I think that's how we approach it, trying to build a very gamified arcade version of entrepreneurship and pursuit of building products for other people. Talk about looking at what works and what's making money on the Internet, because I feel like there are layers to that onion. Sometimes by the time I'm seeing Instagram reels of somebody driving a supercar and they say they made their money on Facebook ads, like the Facebook ad arbitrage might have closed and that person might now be selling a course to get you to sell a course to then sell Facebook ads.

1:38:12There are like four levels of abstraction. What is the correct way for young people to actually go and find the real opportunities and not the things that have been abstracted into LARPs at this point? Yeah. Well, I think the infrastructure in every single one of those businesses is always the same. So when you go and experiment with one business and then you go to the next one, a lot of that carries over. And I mean, what I would suggest is we try to do a very good job on WAP showing which businesses are actually working really well and which models are working really well. So my advice would be to go do that.

1:38:44But I think it's ultimately just try to experiment as much as you possibly can. And don't feel like you're wasting a lot of time because the only real risk is not doing anything. And my probably really overarching advice to young people would be just to try things out and see what happens and fuck around and find out, if you will, a little bit. So I think that that's the spirit of where we are now in businesses and how ephemeral everything's getting and how much experimentation you see when you open your Twitter feed. And that's a good thing. It floods the market with competition. It floods the market with people that are trying to differentiate ever so slightly from the prior iteration.

1:39:21And that ultimately brings a lot more value to end consumers and makes everything cheaper and makes everyone a little bit more money. So I think that's a pretty good thing. Talk about the CLI. Finally, we have a CLI. Why is that important? Websites are pretty good. APIs work in many ways. What's the point of the CLI? I think people have historically found WAP to be relatively confusing of a concept. And I think the reason for that is because the UX that we've built... Made me feel like a boomer. I was on there trying to spin up content rewards back in the day very early with the show. And I was like, I feel old.

1:40:04Yeah, I think the UX we've built has never really caught up to the API we've built. And I think that we're a very fundamentally API first company. We have a very engineering led team. And that results in a fantastic API that has, I mean, when you look at the functionality that our API supports, it is literally every single thing that you could possibly need to programmatically run a business. That's payment acceptance. It's ad creation. It's money movement. You can even find people in the real world to do labor for you, clipping and whatnot, all via the API. That is very difficult to build a UX around.

1:40:40Very, very difficult. And the CLI allows all the functionality to be brought into your terminal and to be called from any agent via API. And that results in way better experience. So the CLI is very cool. Hypothetically, if I start, the three of us start a hair care business together since we have wild hair. There are a number of steps that I'm going to take to promote my business. The classic one that I would go to WAP for might be clipping. I might film a whole bunch of content. You film some videos about your hair care routine. All of a sudden we have an idea of a business. I like it. It's a style.

1:41:20And we want to take that to social media. So we want to engage with WAP broadly. Now, I could use an AI agent to interact with the API, the CLI. Does that just make it easier if I'm doing the programming? Or is there a world where I'm actually finding a programmer on WAP to help me with that side of the distribution? So the old adage is that ideas are easy and execution is hard. And we're seeing that be flipped on its face in real time. And I think that what we actually prefer is that, you know, there's a saying that's also like every business begins with a secret. And a lot of times the secret lies in the execution.

1:41:54But we want the secret to be all about the idea. So we want the extent of that launch to basically be we want to start a haircut business for tech people with crazy hair. And that's the whole business. And every other part of the execution is handled. Sure. And that is a way better world than what it is today where you actually have to think through everything from even making content. The developer, that's all semantics. It shouldn't even be a conversation. So that's what you get of the CLI. You can literally go to the Swap CLI today and say, start a haircutting business that's meant for tech people with crazy hair.

1:42:26Get me some customers. And you could go so far if it was localized to say, find me a person to cut the hair. And the CLI will end-to-end do that via any agent that you want. Okay, cool. Are the youth hitting it big with SMB AI transformation? So everyone knows the big consulting shops are printing billions. I just saw a reel about this. It was like if you want an SF90, go to someone's real estate listing and take photos, turn it into a beautiful website, go sell it to the real estate agent for$500. bucks. You're like, go to go tour a$30 million property that they're trying to sell, but they don't have a nice website for.

1:43:10They're just on MLS. Make a beautiful website, sell it to them for 500 bucks. Yeah. And even, even, even back in our day, you could, even when it was easy to build a website, there were still business owners. I remember, I remember, you know, like a friend's parent at one point was like, if you can build me a website, I'll give you 500 bucks. You can just find a template for like 20 bucks. But that's time. People don't want to prop themselves. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that is, I'd say what it looks like to find all these hyper niche markets and call them arbitrages and then capitalize on them and then go to the next one.

1:43:44And there are so many more than anybody can remotely imagine. I mean, I remember when, I guess, eight, 10 years ago, I was making websites for people and doing that exact tactic. And now it's like you have all leveraging the world and it's basically limited your creativity and grit. And now you can just go, you can find 10 ,000 small businesses in your state, let's say, make them a brand new website, show them the website and say, do you want this? I'll give it to you for 200 bucks. And I think a lot of them would be like, looks good. I'll send you 200 bucks. Even though you just ripped it with like codex or whatever agent you're using.

1:44:17Totally, totally, totally, totally. Talk about ads, WAP ads. What is the shape of that product? How does it fit into everything else? Yeah, I don't know if you guys have ever ran meta ads before, but it's a pain in the ass. And it's very difficult to go on and navigate simply the UX of that platform. And that's coming from, for us, we grew up running meta ads to a Shopify store. That's all we did. And when we look at our platform and our merchant base and what people want to accomplish on it and how we believe that the more vertically integrated it is, the easier it's going to be for agents and for users to use it, But the next obvious jump was to say, okay, people are earning now$400 million,$500 million a month on the platform.

1:44:59And almost all that money is spent on ads. And because of that, why don't we let people programmatically run ads immediately after getting the payment? You don't have to wait any days for it to settle. You get all the data and what's working, can iterate on the fly. And it's not just meta that you're running ads to. It's actually the whole internet. And that is the ad product that we have available. And it's pretty cool. People like it. And I mean, that's a very, very fast going product. Take us through your reactions to all the trend pieces about clipping this year. Better late than never. Yeah.

1:45:36When. So what I'm referring to is like there's been a number of trend pieces sort of like breaking down the clipping economy, heavily driven by some of the kick live streamers like the clavicular, among others, that sort of crossed the chasm and got profiled in The New York Times. And so there were knock-on pieces about this idea that you create a lot of content like we do on a three-hour show. We clip it. Or you do an eight-hour, 12-hour live stream. You clip it. And your business has been very integral to that boom. But when did that start for you? Like when did you realize the power of clipping?

1:46:06Like how has that evolved? Yeah, I think people overestimate how intentional we are about some of these markets that have come up. And I think it more happens to us because we have such a good API. It's just a platform. And it's just a platform. And people come up with all these crazy business models. They explode, people exploit them, and then it becomes so saturated that it's actually not even that cool anymore. And I think what's happening with clipping is it is still a very, very, very powerful instrument. Because of how much money is going into it, because of how inherently so much value can be gained by brands and companies, et cetera, you're going to have a lot of bad actors and people trying to exploit different people and all sorts of different bad stuff.

1:46:44And I think that's where a lot of what people are potentially saying on the pessimistic side of clipping. On the optimistic side of clipping, we look at it as yet another way to earn income on the Internet for a huge amount of people. And especially if they are not sophisticated enough to potentially start a business yet, they actually start with clipping. And that's a very great way to learn how to make content, learn how to help other businesses create real value. And all the payments infrastructure, it scales super well so that people can actually earn a sustainable income by doing something like clipping.

1:47:13That can be extrapolated to data labeling, can be extrapolated to tennis coaching, can be extrapolated to all sorts of things that we're starting to see on our platform. Other platforms integrate and pay out via our rails, which is simply creating more ways like clipping to earn money while still hopefully being value accretive to businesses. So that's what I would gleam from clipping. Have you talked to any legacy media organizations about clipping? I'm thinking of like Fox News produces so much content. Local news produces a lot of content. ABC, NBC, CBS. Like there are basically content farms that are effectively live streaming.

1:47:54It's a very different motion for these organizations. Would you recommend they get into Clinton? Yeah. I mean our focus is trying to build the infrastructure and the platform. And then whatever happens happens. Yeah, whatever happens happens. I think as long as it's by our terms, it's safe. And I think in the context of a local news station, they're very under-resourced typically. And if we can make it so easy where they actually can, a couple clicks or even one click or even one prompt, spawn a bunch of clippers to amplify their media, that's great. As it stands today, it's a little bit too difficult.

1:48:27And I think that's where you have agencies fill in the gap and fill these arbitrage opportunities. Sure, sure. How would you rate sentiment among WAP users? Are the, is there, because WAP users are not necessarily reflective of like all of like the next generation of, of entrepreneurs and people that are starting careers. It's certainly selecting for people that are, have higher agency. They're trying to figure out how to make living online or just make, as you say, make cool stuff with their friends. But is there a feeling that there's a ton of, a ton of opportunity and that now is like an amazing time to be like coming online?

1:49:07Or is there at all the same kind of like vibe session that you see among people, maybe college students that are trying to find jobs and feeling like. It's vibe session. Oh, like the vibe recession? Yeah. Oh, yeah. OK. I thought you were mashing up vibe and obsession. You're obsessed with vibe. I think that the sentiment is overwhelmingly positive, like beyond optimistic. And I've actually never seen it inside into this level. I think where you look at a lot of the people that call themselves entrepreneurs, people that are trying to build a business, WAP users are unique because likely they're going to be earning money.

1:49:43And that's very different than trying to launch a vibe-coded app and praying for users. So I think that what we see is that when we talk to our users and businesses on the platform, either at in-person events or via our chat on the platform, they are so excited about building their thing. And they're actually equally as excited about experimenting with other businesses, like we were talking about earlier, because it feels like the possibilities are completely in your control. You know, you have so much opportunity right now. There's so many micro markets that can be tapped into and exploited arbitrage-wise.

1:50:18And I think the young kids realize that. And they're going crazy right now. I don't think there's an apprehension, at least in our user base, as to what they're going to do post-AI. I think that that's a very exciting thing for them. And they feel like they're grabbing by the horns and taking control of their destiny, which is exactly what's going to happen. What's the state of WAP enabling sort of human-in-the-loop AI companies? I'm thinking about your partnership with Replit, PokeCal.com. It feels like there's a potential to launch something that the agents aren't quite there or it has to interface with the real world in some way.

1:50:55But if you can bring some extra humans to bear in a particular workflow, especially for consumer, there's like an opportunity to build businesses there. Totally. I think one of the largest markets that is being talked about, but perhaps not enough, is just the demand for data right now is so crazy. And when you look at especially developing countries, one of the most lucrative ways to earn money on the Internet is by submitting data and by recording themselves do day-to-day tasks. And I think if you look at the broad base of human-in-the-loop applications, especially around money, of course you can start a business.

1:51:35You can sell your time on Cal.com. You can build a really cool website and repl it and build a business. But if you want to think in the clipping construct, and perhaps you can think of clipping as act one of this, there is a lot of things people can do that AI cannot. And that largely pertains to data. I mean, there's a huge crisis right now, I think, where people are realizing that the AI doesn't actually have the level of original thought that is needed to lift anything off the ground. And what are they doing? They're spending billions of dollars to get people's ideas. And that is not – I mean in some way that does economically get to the person.

1:52:10But I think we can do it even better. And the human in the loop we view is actually the most critical piece of any business and any real economic output because it does start with someone's idea and creative ingenuity versus an AI being, oh, let's build a business that does haircuts for tech people. That's not necessarily – I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Maybe it does now because it's already out in the ether. But yeah. Last question. How's the business growing in 2026? What's the financial plan? Do you want to raise more money? Do you want to raise a bunch of money? Do you want to IPO the company?

1:52:42Well, I think we want to deliver on our mission. And I think it's the most confidence we've ever had that we actually can. And I would say there's going to certainly – it's going to require investment. And there's clear prospects. We're exploding internationally right now with very little real motion that we've established intentionally internationally. And we're underinvested across the board. We have a very lean team still. The growth has been really record-breaking. I posted a tweet last week. We're underwater right now. It's really crazy. I mean, we can't go five minutes without something crazy happening in a good way or bad way.

1:53:25And I think it's part of building a business at our scale. So growth is phenomenal. I mean, I don't really know if I can talk about it a lot publicly, but. You can. You can say whatever you want. You can give us all the numbers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're accelerating growth at a pretty massive scale. Yeah. I mean, if we're doing$400,$500 million a month in earnings, and I mean, a lot of our takers are public. You can do the math. It's getting a lot more serious, and we don't take that responsibility lightly. That's amazing. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much. for coming on and breaking it down for us.

1:54:01We will talk to you later. But for now, we will bring in Katie Roof. She is the editor of Business Insider. We're very excited to have her joining the show. It's time to bust down the paywall. Jordy, you want to do the honors? That's right. We got to bust down the paywall because we have Katie Roof here. We have a physical paywall here. I'll bust it down. Do it, John.

1:54:26There we go. You know her from her scoops, many paywall busting scoops. We built a real paywall here in the Ultradome for you. Yes, for busting down. In your honor. Welcome to the show. How is life? How is the new gig? Well, good to be here. I just started the new gig yesterday, so so far so good. I got through a new higher orientation okay and ready to get scooping. Yes, of course. We won't ask you how you get your scoops. We all know signal DMs probably. but what is the shape of Business Insider these days? How do you fit into the organization? And then I want to talk about where Business Insider is going editorially.

1:55:07Sure. So I know Jamie Heller from when we were both at the Wall Street Journal. She oversaw all business and technology coverage there, and she's been brought in to be the editor-in-chief of Business Insider, where she's changing the direction towards more scoops than original content. That's partly how I fit in, you know, stuff people would actually pay for. And so, yeah, so I'm part of that new direction, that new chapter for Business Insider. And I'm also part of a new program for the parent company, Axel Springer. I'm in the Global Reporters Network, which is a network where I team up with Politico and our other sister publications.

1:55:47We just acquired The Telegraph in the UK. We own a lot of stuff in Europe. So, you know, whatever they acquire next, my stuff will appear in those news outlets as well. Take us into a scoop. I want to know how often you're working on a story and there's other reporters chomping at the scoop. What is that process like? How much time do you have for a lot of these stories with how quickly AI is moving? I can imagine you catch a whiff of a story. you're chasing it down. Sometimes, hopefully most of the time you get to it first, but then other times it's a, it's a dog eat dog world. It's a dog eat scoop world out here.

1:56:33Right. It's true. It's gotten a lot more competitive, uh, you know, these days, I feel like back in like 2020, 2021, I could get most of the scoops and I still get a lot of them, but, uh, there's a lot of reporters now doing what I do. And, you know, being first is harder. But I think the key is to not just go after things that are rumors that are widely circulating, because everyone can hear about that. Some of my biggest scoops have actually been predicting what happens next. And I will just ask around about my theories, like with this company by this company, I don't call people up and say I heard this if I didn't hear this.

1:57:10But if I'm having an extended conversation with them, I just throw out a lot of scenarios and then sometimes we're like, you're right. This company is buying this company or this company is going public or they're raising, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Can you talk to me about in regards to the paywall, the business of media these days, how is the, you know, original reporting scoop driven journalism versus opinion versus news aggregation actually changing? And are we firmly in the AI is affecting the business or are we still just seeing knock-on effects from social media and just a screenshot of something can change the business model?

1:57:52Well, I think original reporting matters more than ever because regardless, you know, technology can change and the format in which we tell our stories can change. But people are always going to want to find out what's going on in the world. And I think, you know, the reporters like myself who have been fortunate to make the decision to double down on human skills instead of just writing skills, we have, you know, we still have value because I do things that maybe AI is not doing by having a network of people asking questions that they weren't planning to share and informing the public of that.

1:58:25Do you think any tech CEOs or people with potential scoops would ever talk to an AI reporter who's digging for a scoop? Well, I mean, yes, if it's something they really want out there. But the reality is, you know, people think that most of these stories are things people wanted out there. It's usually they were kind of neutral. Like, usually people weren't, like, trying to leak something, but, like, reporters were asking. They're like, oh, yeah, you're right. Like, that's usually how it goes. And so, you know, AI, you know, unless they proactively want to plant something, which would be almost more like PR, what PR does, the PR pitches, then, yeah, I think it's not the same.

1:59:08How do you clock when a story's been planted? There was a story about Colossus Biosciences raising at between$20 and$30 billion. And to me, that just screams like they planted a story because I don't... And I'm just going to say it. I don't know that many institutional investors that are sort of clamoring to invest in Colossus Biosciences. And it's a way in my theory is that it's a way to signal to potential retail investors that we're open for business. This round's getting hot. This is something I think about all the time. I mean, I take accuracy super seriously. And, you know, as much pressure as there is to be first to the news, I think it's much easier to destroy your credibility than it is to build it.

1:59:57And so I always try to think, does this make sense? Do they have an agenda here like to be misleading or dishonest? And, you know, I used to say to some people, sometimes reporters past jobs might hear about something and they would be like, company X wants to be worth 10 billion. And I would say, well, I also want to be worth 10 billion. You know, can they can they get the 10 billion? I think that's the real question. And so I think that you have to obviously people have incentives to use us to manipulate public opinion. We have to be savvy about that. do you think with how dominant tech is generally now, it feels like it's a bigger story?

2:00:36We see it, you know, tech has moved from the business and finance section of the Wall Street Journal to the front page more and more, not every day, but, you know, just today Chinese AI models raise alarms on the front page. It's international news. Is that, do you see that as driving business insiders TAM, essentially? Like is the TAM for technology scoops and private markets news going even bigger now? Yeah, you know, and I think that's absolutely true. I think there's a lot of curiosity out there about AI and the money behind it and how it's going to change things and transform the world. And so, yeah, I think that's part of why, you know, there's so many news outlets have been doubling down on getting more venture capital and AI reporters, because I think that there's broad appeal.

2:01:25Even if you're not an investor that's standing to make money off of this AI boom, you're curious to see where it's headed. Yeah. And then last question for me. I'm interested. I mean, we love Business Insider. We love business. We consider ourselves a bit of insiders ourselves sometimes. But I'm wondering where you want the brand of Business Insider to go and where you see it in a few years after you've been on the job for a while. Well, from what I understand, Jamie – I'm not running Business Insider. I have a fancy title. I know. But Jamie is running this, and she's got – she's really made a big difference already in bringing – right now.

2:02:08To us, you're the CEO of Axel Springer now, okay? Doffner, you're out. Katie Rufson. She's got the scoops that we know and love. And so, I'm sorry, Doffner. So, you know, she's already played a major role as our editor-in-chief in bringing it. They've doubled their exclusive content. I think it used to be 40%, and now it's 80%. And so I think that I'm part of that strategy where they want to just build upon on that. Fantastic. Well, congratulations. Congrats on the new role. And thank you for all of your work over the last couple of years that has contributed to the show. There's a lot to talk about.

2:02:49We couldn't do the show without you. So thank you. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the shout outs. Of course. Cheers, Katie. We'll talk to you soon. Let me tell you about public.com. Investing for those who take it seriously. stocks, options, bonds, crypto, treasuries, and more with great customer service. You know who's not public, but you can still read the financials of, is the German nightclub Berghain. Is that how you pronounce it? Berghain? Berghain? Berghain. Berghain. I always sort of mumble through it. Yeah. Maybe they should have the Axel Springer corporate retreat there. That would be a good option.

2:03:25Yeah. Okay. I'm sharing this. Yeah. It's in the Financial Times. Read through it. Okay, so basically, R. Karazian, the lead economist at Ramp Economics Lab over at Ramp, says, Today I learned German companies have to publish financials even when privately held. We can talk about how much of a nightmare that is, but this club, Berghain, Berghain? Berghain. I'm all over the place with this pronunciation. Anyway, 1.4 million dollars or euros in net profit in 2024, 414 ,000 in annual rent, 355 employees. You can just go look it up. 14 ,000? What? 414 ,000 euros in annual rent. Okay, that's more like it because I've only walked by it, but it is a massive building.

2:04:20I thought you said 14. And the Financial Times has a whole deep dive into the nightclub. But this has got to be a nightmare. Yeah, so let's talk about the implications. Yeah. Let's talk about the implications of small business revenue being public. One, terrible for course bros. That's why they have to go to Dubai because they can't LARP. Yeah. You know, if you're LARPing around in London. Yeah, and you're saying, oh, I make so much money in real estate. I remember there was a YouTuber who did – he was above board. He actually did a tell-all on CNBC, How I Make Money, Millennial Money, some segment they did on him.

2:04:55And he's like, I'm a real estate guy and I make$10 million. And he broke it down and he was like, I made$300 ,000 from real estate and$9 ,700 ,000 from YouTube. And it was because he was making so much money with this great media business that he had that he actually was. And he had good advice about real estate, but he wasn't running a real real estate firm. He was a real estate associate who created a fantastic YouTube channel that was equally impressive or maybe more impressive. But as we were talking to Stephen about, how do you know what's working? Well, apparently in Europe, you can just look up the financials of every company and know, oh, well, they have high margins.

2:05:34I should just copy them, right? Basically, yeah, I looked at investing in a company in the UK. And yeah, I got the financials. But then they were like, yeah, you can just look this up. and confirm it with, you can do basically like a records request. Yeah. But yeah, it'd be very interesting if we had anything like that with startups, right? Because every time there was a big funding round, people would just be like, How does this make sense? How does this make sense? Although it does seem like it's on some sort of delay. It's only annual reporting. I know, but still imagine when that reporting comes out and they're like, Like, wow, this$10 billion company only did$10 million last year, which would be happening.

2:06:18For some of our private markets unicorns, that would be a huge deal to dig into the numbers. Although, even the massively successful venture-backed companies have complicated financials, the disclosures would be difficult. I just think it's crazy that Berghain as this cultural institution is only putting up 1.4 million euros in net profit. Well, Selah underscore has a take, says companies like this club don't really exist to deliver a financial profit. They do absolutely drive social capital to those involved in ownership. So perhaps you are owning a stake in this institution to meet people, do business deals at the club, meet others.

2:07:02Sam says we need to LBO and franchise ASAP. That's a good idea. anyway IMAX is in trouble loosely the 70mm IMAX that has been running 24-7 at the Irvine Spectrum for the Odyssey overheated today Bill Hunt shares some extra news says the scary thing here is that IMAX can't build any more new projectors this was reported earlier they apparently don't have a complete set of the engineering blueprints Most of the engineers who designed them have retired or passed away, and the parts supply chains have long since dried up. That seems like a bigger problem than the blueprints. You've got to be able to one-shot a bunch of IMAX blueprints.

2:07:48Can't you just, like, take the part? That's a good point. Yeah, you should just be able to take it apart, take a picture of every part, and then figure out how it works together. Codex. Fire it up. So the goal for the foreseeable future is to upgrade and keep all of the existing projectors running for as long as they can. This is the true reindustrialization project. We were wondering, like, what's the next Anderol? It's the next IMAX. That's what we're looking for. Somebody cranking out American-made 70-millimeter IMAX projectors. That's the real goal. Big news out of Google. Logan Kilpatrick, friend of the show, says, say hello to Gemini 3.6 Flash.

2:08:29We talked about this a little bit, but there are some benchmarks here. We love benchmarks. designed to be higher intelligence, more token efficient, and with a new lower price based directly on developer feedback. 3.6 Flash continues our progress towards models that are deeply usable in real world scenarios. Congrats to the whole DeepMind team over there. He said this model is much more efficient and spends a lot less tokens to deliver better performance. And also the big news, he said we have started our most ambitious pre-training run yet for Gemini 4 and are excited by the progress. I think that there's a lot of, is Tebow trolling him with hope it finishes one day too?

2:09:07Wow, that's a spicy post. But, I mean, the last pre-train that came out of Google was interesting. It had a different flavor to it. And they did the initial responses. They were a little more terse, a little tighter. I enjoyed poking around with Gemini. I thought it was fun. We're counting on you, Logan. Good luck. Before our next guest, we have a post from Sheil Mona. What'd he say? He says, very cool idea. Vacation with an artist. Travel the world and learn new skills like ceramics, street art, bookbinding via a mini apprenticeship, three to ten days with master artisans. In many cases, you stay with them too.

2:09:46This got me thinking, what if you could vacation with someone that was one shot by AI? That sounds terrible. I would like to vacation with a capital allocator at the Yellowstone Club and the Amman. Do a tour of the Amman. You can do this, but not on a website. You have to know them personally, I think. But I'm surprised this isn't an Airbnb. It sounds, hey, this idea sounds pretty crazy, vacation with a capital allocator. But there's probably a price, right? It just might be egregious. Maybe 20 % of equity in your company. I'm interested that this is its own website, Valois, vacation with an artist.

2:10:23It feels like it's directly in line with the Airbnb, everything app, roadmap. app. The idea was that you would be able to go. Anyway, we have our next guest in the waiting room. Let's bring in Zabane Dar from Dimension. He's the founder. Welcome to the show. How you doing? How are you? What's going on? Give us the news. We got to hit this gong. The newest size lord. The newest size lord, the capital allocator. Oh yeah, he just hit it himself. That was good alignment.

2:10:53Great stuff. How much did you raise? We didn't even get the number. We just went right $800 million. $800 million. I'm sorry that you couldn't pull together the last$200 million there. $200 million short, maybe. $800 million. Who's counting? Close enough. Close enough. They're over$1.6 billion in assets. That's right. It's a good start. It's a good start. Dimension three,$800 million at our legal hard cap. So I think we went out for$700 or thereabouts. So legally, we can't raise more than a... Put me in jail if I raise any more. We all know the demand was there. We all know the demand was there.

2:11:34Yeah, talk about Fund 1 and 2, since it's your first time on the show. What got you to this monumental fund? Yeah, Fund 1,$350, that was a 2022 vintage. Fund 2 was$500, that's a 2025 vintage, so just about 12 months ago. So we started the firm, my co-founders, Adam, Nan, and I would spend the last decade investing across the union of life sciences and technology. Fund one was very much so at the intersection. So companies that were equal parts tech, equal parts life sciences. Fund two, we started to expand more so the union. Fund three, it really is the frontiers of science and compute. So companies that are touching silicon, next-gen GPUs, CPUs for ML and AI architectures, all all the way through ML infrastructure.

2:12:22And then on the science side, world models, Neolabs, really kind of pioneering both physics, but then also biotech and next-gen medicines as well. Do you think we'll see a coalescing of business models in the next generation of tech-enabled biotech companies? Because there's an opportunity to be sort of really full stack, train a model, use it to develop a drug, take that drug all the way through the FDA approval process, use AI to write the applications and go back and forth and then own the intellectual property all the way. That feels like a lot of different CapEx muscles flexing at the same time, but maybe that is the future.

2:13:06How do you see it actually playing out? What's the common pattern? My co-founder, Adam, is Australian, and he has a want of saying horses for courses, which for I think the North American audience here, it means to each their own. more or less. We're going to start using that for our North American audience. Horses for courses. Big in Japan. For example, Chai, which I think you maybe had Josh or Jack on your show in the past. The round that we helped to co-lead with Index and Sequoia and Kleiner last week. They are very much so doing the latter, which you described, selling their services as a SaaS product into pharma.

2:13:47On the other hand, we have companies like New Limit that are developing similar ilks of technology, but doing so with the express intent of developing their medicines end to end and one day actually commercializing medicines that affect aging and longevity. Are aging longevity the hot topics because they're so universal? Or do you think you'll see more of the, I don't know if I'd call it the traditional biotech playbook, but there's often this, you know, there's a whole pipeline of biotech companies that are targeting, like, there's 5 ,000 people that have this rare disease, and it still turns into a billion-dollar acquisition, and it's this odd pattern that doesn't really ever make it to the front page of Time Magazine, but obviously has an impact both financially and medically on those people that were suffering from that disease.

2:14:38I think both extremes are true. Earlier this year, RevMed had a very stunning phase three result for their lead drug affecting patients with pancreatic cancer for for the rest of humanity for a thousand years from now two thousand years from now if you have pancreatic cancer you should have a somewhat effective treatment and that's really based on a biotech based in california that in the last six months developed and kind of showed that clinical data and that's stunning of course pancreatic cancer if that's not as uh uh prevalent as aging which everybody has or maybe obesity or something. At the same time, we are, I think, witnessing a revolution of what it means or a re-underwriting of what it means to be diseased.

2:15:20And even something like obesity or maybe 10 years ago or 15 years ago, pharma and biotech, frankly, they didn't invest in these areas because they didn't consider it a disease. They considered it a behavioral problem. Today, it's considered a disease and it's the largest drug on the planet. You're seeing it in areas like aging and longevity, inflammation, immunology, depicts if anyone has atopic derm or eczema, it's one of the largest drugs on the planet today. 20 years ago, no one would touch that because diseases that were skin related weren't considered serious enough. We are starting to see, I think, a redefinition of the types of areas where biotech and pharma can actually play.

2:15:55I'm sure you got asked this during the fundraising process, but what's your overall worldview on investment opportunities around peptides as a category, you know, basically drugs that people are taking somewhat recreationally now, but have a bunch of different benefits that are in a, you know, sort of continuous gray area. But what's your outlook on the category? Because there's billions of dollars of revenue there. There's some really interesting, exciting, at least indicators that they can have great impacts. But what's your view? I take the red and the yellow shots on Monday and Tuesdays and the green and the blue shots on Fridays and Saturdays.

2:16:41And my wife doesn't get that. I'm kidding. I would not recommend this stuff to anybody. Look, there is a history of peptides and hormone mimetics as drugs. GLP-1s, clip ones are in some sense those exactly. Whenever you're sticking anything into yourself, you want to actually know what it is. You want to know, make sure that there's no impurities in it. We don't understand the biology, the mechanisms in many of these cases. And so I think even the scuttlebutt that you guys and I am probably hearing about the efficacy or effectiveness of, you know, the SF tech community or the New York kind of, you know, tech community taking these things.

2:17:20Um, my suspicion is that's probably more placebo, uh, uh, that not, I'd be very careful about doing any of this. I certainly wouldn't myself do it, nor would I let my friends and family do it. Uh, how do you think AI affects, uh, sort of like, I don't know if it's called repurposing drugs, but, uh, the big GLP one breakthrough for obesity was originally a diabetes drug. And there's been a few examples of drugs in history, many examples actually, where it started as a heart medication and then became an erectile dysfunction drug. And it feels like in an age of AI, even if you don't get the super intelligence that can just imagine the cure for cancer, you at the very least could potentially test every drug against every indication, maybe more efficiently.

2:18:06What does sort of like cross-application of biotechnology look like in the future? I think two things are true. With ML and AI, we are better able to understand the root cause of disease mechanism pathway and kind of the industry nomenclature. And with a better understanding of mechanisms and pathways, we can repurpose molecules, whether they're biologics or peptides or small molecules, against those where we know that they are known to be effective. The other, which is simultaneously true, historically, we have the vast majority of known targets for disease biology have been quote unquote undreadable and so it's not a question of taking a cell of the asset from Pfizer or Novartis or Lilly it's a it's a question that we just don't know how to design the molecules to actually perturb those proteins intracellularly or extracellularly yet.

2:19:00My suspicion is in the next five to six to seven years with the companies in the in the modes of the chai's of the world for example we will have technologies to perturb what we want to perturb. And so we'll both be able to repurpose when there is a shell asset against kind of our new knowledge of biology, but then also leverage generative AI and ML to create molecules to perturb biology where maybe the shell assets don't quite yet exist. What letter are you most proud of and why? Z. It's a good letter. No, no, I'm talking about your letters. I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Z, underrated letter. In terms of letters that we have published from Dimension?

2:19:45Yes, you published some beautiful letters. But maybe it's an idea in a letter. The chat was asking. Yeah. The what if we're right letter, that was actually first written as a letter confidentially to our partners and LPs in Q1 of this year as part of our annual 2025 recap. And we anonymized part of it. We took out some parts of obviously the financial information and decided to share it with the broader kind of entrepreneurial tech and science audience. I think it resonated with people, I think, especially in this moment in time where there is so much tension geopolitically and technologically.

2:20:22And from a class and labor perspective, so many things are happening and there's a lot of tension. And to maybe take a step back and say, hey, what's the good that's happening if we're right in developing these technologies and sciences? How does that bend the arc of humanity and society for the better? that was fun to write. I think it got a groove with a good audience. We're pretty proud of that. I think more people can be espousing and writing that sort of stuff. Last question. How many cups of coffee a day do you drink? There's new reporting that says five is good for you. 15, really? Are you a coffee maxer?

2:20:53I have my fridge cigarette. There we go. Cheers. I try to limit it to probably two or three. If I do have a cup of coffee after four, I'm probably wired until two of them. So well within the healthy limits. Healthy guy working on health and AI. Well, congratulations on the fun. Thank you so much for coming. Congrats to you and all your partners. Yeah, on an absolute generational run over there. Looking forward to meeting more of your founders. Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Have a good one. Let me tell you about Railway. Railway is the all-in-one intelligent cloud provider. Use your favorite agent to deploy web apps, servers, databases, and more while Railway takes care of scaling, monitoring, and security.

2:21:39Up next. Up next. We have Chad Edwards. We'll bring Chad in in just a second. Briefly, I'm going to tell you about this interesting screenshot from Reddit, an LLM stenography tool. A steganography tool? How do you pronounce that? Kind of neat with how the EU is trying to gain access to all communications. So basically you use an LLM to transform your text messages, secret messages. They look normal, but in fact, there's a decoded message. So on the left, it says, message to Bob, I got coffee downtown, and it's actually pretty good. Thinking of what to make for dinner. Want to come help me cook?

2:22:17Overdid it on the soup yesterday, though. And that is actually secretly encoded to mean they caught Matthew last week because he spoke against them. Explain how this works, Tyler. Yeah, so it's not the, the LLM is not actually doing the encrypting. Basically, you encrypt it first using some like standard process, and then you get like the output of that is like some cipher tech. Like a lookup table, basically, or something. So basically, you encrypt it, you get some like, something that looks like scrambled, like a scrambled string. Okay. And you basically... Hydrate that? You have these bits, and then you basically use the bits to determine which token you're going to use in the LLM.

2:22:52You basically need to use an open source LLM. People are accusing John Exley in the chat I've been doing this for months, sending coded messages to everyone. It is very cool, though. I thought this was a cool idea. I think it's a cool demo. I don't know that it's wildly useful, but for certain people that need to send secret messages back and forth, go ahead. Also, they're calling North Korea NoCo like it's the cool, trendy part of town. I thought that was a funny post. Anyway, we have Chad Edwards from Cusp AI in the waiting room. Let's bring in Chad Edwards, the co-founder and CEO. How are you doing, Chad?

2:23:27Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. Give us the news. How are you doing? You raised some money? How much did you raise? Look at this background. Incredible. How much did you raise? That's the UK as a semiconductor chip. We raised$450 million. Congratulations. Anyone I've heard of invest? It's a murderer's row. You've got Jeff Bezos. You've got a bunch of other folks in. Yeah, Kleiner Perkins, NEA. There you go. Congratulations. What are you building? Break down the business. Yeah, so at CUSP, we're building essentially a search engine for materials, so a generative AI platform where you can discover entirely new materials.

2:24:10And, of course, it's not something we think about in our day-to-day lives, but everything we hear and talk about day-to-day, such as the pursuit of intelligence or the energy transition or the climate crisis, if you boil all of these things down to the fundamentals, they're a material science problem. And, for example, a semiconductor chip is around 60 different plus elements. It's 99.99 pure silicon. And so if we can come up with a better way to discover new materials, we can come up with better chips. We can improve the efficiency of solar cells. And we can also work on climate technologies to leave the world a better place.

2:24:43And so they're kind of the core focus areas for our company. Yeah. What's the most underrated new material? Probably room temperature superconductors, I would say. What do you think? Yeah, I mean, there's a few teams now pursuing room temperature superconductivity. It's kind of the holy grail of material science. There's still some pretty interesting physics to be figured out along the way. But if someone can correct that, then the implications are huge. So, yeah, let's see. Is there a power law in applications of advanced material science broadly, like battery technology would be by far the biggest market if you could unlock that?

2:25:20or is it sort of distributed and there's so many applications, there's not necessarily one that you'll be focusing on in the short term? Yeah, I mean, the opportunity space is absolutely enormous. We could be sat here talking about the chip industry or the energy industry or, you know, climate. There's just so much opportunity out there. But I think what we've seen as a company is the semiconductor industry have basically pulled us by all four limbs in the direction of semiconductors. So we didn't set out to build the company as a semiconductor company. We've kind of built a platform that was horizontal and we felt the market pull in that direction.

2:25:52And again, it boils down to the very fact that with everything we're now seeing in AI, there's a real demand on the chips to be more performant, have higher energy efficiency. And all of that fundamentally boils down to better materials. So I'd say if I had to pick one, semis. Yeah. So, I mean, obviously, huge markets, semis, massive market, any application you have there will have huge demand. And what is the capital intensivity of the business? I mean, you raised$100 million Series A last year, now$450 million. Do you have compute costs, training costs? Is this just to hire the world's best material scientists?

2:26:29Is there a big data acquisition bill that's coming? What is the use of capital over the next two years look like? Yes, obviously, we're nowhere near the kind of frontier model LLM type expenditure. We don't need to train huge models like that. We train more domain-specific models. And as part of that, of course, our three big kind of cost centers would be people. So hiring the best people in AI and machine learning, which is what we've been able to do, and retain those folks. And we've seen some of the salaries that go around the world for people in that category now. Computer is another one. So we have a very big partnership with NVIDIA, and they're part of a big announcement that we made yesterday.

2:27:08And then third and foremost is data generation in an experimental sense. So, of course, we have to ground all of our work in physical experiments. And so we have a network of labs globally now where we generate data for us to train the models. Would you vertically integrate there at some point to close the loop, build your own material science lab where you could prototype new materials and test them? Yeah, I'd say never say never. But at the moment, our thesis has been we can move much faster if we have a network of existing labs around the world. We can tap into them. We can get going very quickly.

2:27:42They have domain experts in those labs that know an awful lot more about the specific domain, and we can't easily replicate that. And a lot of our customers also have their own labs. So, yeah, our model so far has been work with existing labs and customers that have labs, and that allows them to move faster and us to move much faster. But who knows? Maybe one day we say, hey, we're going to build a lab in a certain domain. How do you think about value capture? It's very easy for me to imagine how you would create value for your customers. But if you help somebody discover a new material, that the application of that material could be worth billions of dollars, how do you make sure that it's a fair trade?

2:28:25Yeah, so we've taken a very different approach to the business model. In fact, we're, I think, genuinely the first to have done this in the world. And when we started the company and we pitched this business model to investors, they said, Chad, forget about it. This is never going to work. You're never going to get big corporates paying you royalties on materials. And so for the first two years, I made it my mission to make sure that every customer contract that we have has royalties baked into it. And so we've now proven the kind of biotech type model works now in material science. Companies are prepared to pay you up front for the programs that you set up.

2:28:56And then they're prepared to bake in a royalty at the end so that as that material goes into production, you can kind of share the upside commercial potential of that material. Very, very cool. Cool. This is what I was asking the founder of Chai Discovery, who's doing AI for drug discovery. It feels very, right now they just have a SaaS fee, I think, but it feels very natural for them to get some type of royalty. They help create a hit drug. It's a win-win, great customer alignment there. And it makes so much sense for your business. And you end up building basically a portfolio of bets over time.

2:29:31And even if you have a handful of big winners, I can see how that would generate billions over time. Yeah, exactly. I kind of see my job a little bit analogous to a VC in a way that we have a portfolio of materials and some of our materials are nearer term. They have higher commercial potential and some of our longer term frontier bets. And if we have a balanced portfolio, then hopefully our revenue projections and journey will follow a very steady trajectory. But I can also see merits of the approach that Chai are taking in having predictable monthly incomes and subscriptions to software is also carries your base revenue, whereas the program aspects can be a bit more lumpy.

2:30:14So I could see merits of both approaches. Yeah, so why not both, which we're doing? Do you think that the next round KPI or key metric that you'll be underwriting the deal against will be revenue? Or are there more like scientific milestones, benchmarks, or sort of promising results where you'll be able to totally justify the next expansion pre-revenue? or do you think the business will actually grow in the short term with actual revenue-generating deals? Yeah, so we've tried to kind of go against the grade in that a lot of deep tech companies take forever to get to revenues, and so we've tried to be very commercial very early on.

2:30:58Before this, I built a quantum computing company, which is kind of one of the most extreme versions of pre-revenue. And so, yeah, I've tried to be very, very commercial in this company from very early on, and everything we do is grounded with paying customers. But I think I've also given up predicting when the next fundraise will happen because in every race, I've said we're not going to race for another six to 12 months. And then a few months later, we've been preempted and there's a round coming together. So I don't know exactly what the next metrics look like. Well, congratulations. I mean, I can't wait to talk to you in a couple of months when the next round happens.

2:31:33Yeah, looking forward to it. It'll be any day now, but you're always welcome. Very, very cool business and business model and looking forward to the next conversation. And what a great group of partners with all the companies that you've worked with. It makes so much sense. So good luck and congratulations. We'll talk to you soon. Have a great rest of your week. Cheers, Chad. You take it. Goodbye. We have one last post I want to go through. Ramp launched a model router. Braxton loves it. He says, Ramp launching a model router is God-tier product expansion. The winds are blessing it. The market is exhausted with token maxing.

2:32:10proliferation of new models, sovereignty. This is the first time I've looked at a launch and went, wow, this might be the start of a new core product. Yeah, there's been a bunch of speculation about this, but it makes a lot of sense. RAMP's promise is to save you time and money. The CFOs are increasingly annoyed by token routing. We talked to Eric Gleiman about this last week. Are you using the craziest frontier model, burning millions of tokens to answer the weather? maybe that should have an expense report attached. And so very, very exciting to see where this goes, how they roll it out. I know it's in alpha with a number of customers.

2:32:48And I believe that the product's actually available to non-ramp customers as well. So you can use their product exclusively. Yush says, going after everything time and money touches. I love it. I love it. Anyway, thank you for tuning in. We will see you tomorrow, Wednesday at 11 a.m. Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. And we love you. We love you. Throwing flashbang. Goodbye. Flashbang in the horse.

2:33:37Thank you.